Mobile communications devices are becoming increasingly feature rich. The amount of power required to operate these feature rich devices might steer a manufacturer towards large devices, with large batteries. However, consumers typically choose smaller devices over larger ones and so it becomes a challenge for manufacturers to create the smallest device possible with as long a battery life as possible. Mobile communications devices contain radios which enable communication with a variety of external parties. The use of the radio is usually the mobile communications device's most power consuming operation.
In mobile communications devices one of the more popular applications is wireless messaging. Wireless messaging involves communicating with external parties, often a host service or message provider, to send and receive messages.
One method for retrieving messages has the mobile communications device poll the message provider (or host service) on a regular basis to ask for any pending messages. This method of wireless messaging consumes more power than required because of cases where polling is done when no messages are pending. Since there are no messages pending at the message provider, the poll accomplishes nothing. The extra use of the radio required to send superfluous poll messages to the host service is an unnecessary drain on the battery.
Another method for retrieving messages has the mobile communications device receive a notification message from the message provider (or host service) over a voice communication channel as an SMS (short message service) message and then the mobile communications device retrieves messages from the message provider (host service) using a data channel. This method requires cooperation between the voice and data processors and can lead to design issues and performance degradation. In addition, the use of SMS messaging may also limit the notification message's size, as SMS message's are usually limited to 160 characters in length.